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I’ve read the scandalous accounts of certain politicians and other notables who have wrecked their reputations by sending out obscene “selfies” on the Internet.

I am by nature a rather private person. Anything I undertake in the way of self-exposure I do on the typewriter.

It has always struck me as foolish, and potentially quite dangerous, to conduct discussions of any real importance on the Internet. It’s a bit like whispering one’s intimate secrets into a megaphone.

Naturally this reticence brands me as a creature from another century. And of course, that’s what I am. But I would suggest the revelation this past week that hackers working on behalf of the so-called Islamic State group had breached the social media of the U.S. military’s Central Command validates my caution.

I may in some ways be a fossil. But I’m not a hermit. I’m listed in the phone book. Readers are free to telephone me, and some do. Others communicate by letter.

The Islamic State group has not yet compromised the U.S. mail. The blame checks to Congress for its parsimonious annual funding of the Postal Service.

“We are coming for you,” the radical Islamists warned on Twitter. The threat was aimed at American and allied troops confronting the Islamists in Europe and the Middle East.

Living here in the middle of this continent, I do not feel personally threatened. There’s an ocean and half a world between us and the main Islamist forces.

And with the difficulty they’ll have booking air or steamship passage to the U.S. after the outrage in Paris, I predict they’ll find it a punishing swim.